In 1978, a frail 62-year-old woman from Indore named Shah Bano Begum walked into a courtroom not as a lawyer or an activist, but as a divorced mother of five, seeking something heartbreakingly simple, the right to live with dignity. What began as her personal fight for maintenance against her husband would, over the next few years, shake the foundations of Indian law and politics, and still echo four decades later now, through a new Bollywood film, titled Haq .

The woman who challenged the system

Shah Bano had married Mohammad Ahmed Khan, a prosperous lawyer in Indore, in 1932. For decades, she lived as a homemaker, raising their five children. But when she crossed 60, her husband took a younger wife and, eventually, divorced her using the triple talaq.

She stood alone, yet her voice

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